[Lazarus] String vs WideString

[Tony Whyman]

On 14/08/17 17:47, Sven Barth via Lazarus wrote:
> The main problem of such a dynamic type would be the inability to do 
> fast indexing as the compiler would need to insert runtime checks for 
> the size of a character. I had already thought the same, but then had 
> to discard the idea due to this.

Is this really a big problem? It is not as if it would be necessary to 
do a table lookup everytime you index a string as the indexing method 
could be an attribute of the string and updated with the character 
encoding attribute. Is it really that complicated for the compiler to 
generate code that jumps to an indexing method depending upon a data 
attribute?

Is your problem really more about the result type as, depending on the 
character width, the result could be an AnsiChar or WideChar or a UTF8 
character for which I don't believe there is a defined char type (other 
than an arguable  mis-use of UCS4Char)?

I can accept that a clear up of this area would also have to extend to 
the char types as well - but I would also argue that that is well 
overdue. On a quick count, I found 7 different char types in the system 
unit.